Extrinsic Entwined with Intrinsic Spin Hall Effect in Disordered Mesoscopic Bars

BK Nikolic, LP Zârbo - arXiv preprint cond-mat/0603595, 2006 - arxiv.org
BK Nikolic, LP Zârbo
arXiv preprint cond-mat/0603595, 2006arxiv.org
We show that pure spin Hall current, flowing out of a four-terminal phase-coherent two-
dimensional electron gas (2DEG) within inversion asymmetric semiconductor
heterostructure, contains contributions from both the extrinsic mechanisms (spin-orbit
dependent scattering off impurities) and the intrinsic ones (due to the Rashba coupling).
While the extrinsic contribution vanishes in the weakly and strongly disordered limits, and
the intrinsic one dominates in the quasiballistic limit, in the crossover transport regime the …
We show that pure spin Hall current, flowing out of a four-terminal phase-coherent two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) within inversion asymmetric semiconductor heterostructure, contains contributions from both the extrinsic mechanisms (spin-orbit dependent scattering off impurities) and the intrinsic ones (due to the Rashba coupling). While the extrinsic contribution vanishes in the weakly and strongly disordered limits, and the intrinsic one dominates in the quasiballistic limit, in the crossover transport regime the spin Hall conductance, exhibiting sample-to-sample large fluctuations and sign change, is not simply reducible to either of the two mechanisms, which can be relevant for interpretation of experiments on dirty 2DEGs [V. Sih et al., Nature Phys. 1, 31 (2005)].
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